[…] Making the stretcher, stretching the canvas and manipulating the painting means ensuring that the artist's pragmatic activity is not dissociated from his symbolic activity. Barnett Newman used to explain that before starting on a new canvas, he would take the time to stretch, relax and re-tension the raw canvas on the stretcher, so as to shrink it and render it "inert". By eliminating the "sentimental" quality of the material in this way, Newman sought to cut short the temptation to produce an exclusively aesthetic art object.

Using similar "anti-technical" processes, Maxime Testu attempts to give his canvas an extinct, mute, "silent" presence, to borrow a metaphor from the world of agriculture. By applying layers of washes tinted with red, green, blue or yellow, he obtains a homogenous surface, often quite dull, in which the charcoal drawing is melted into the colour. In their proportions, texture and muted tones, Maxime Testu's paintings evoke the "philosophical" atmosphere of colourfield painting. But the spirit of seriousness associated with this heroic period of the late avant-garde seems to dissipate like a morning mist to the sound of the shepherd's dissonant flute.

Strangely enough, many of the works associated with avant-garde art are directly or indirectly inspired by the pastoral: Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), Matisse's paintings such as La Joie de vivre (The joy of life) and La Danse (The Dance)... Maxime's painting is perhaps a variation on this "avant-garde primitivism", which reappropriates in real time the items circulating in the contemporary art world (in this case, neo-rurality, craftsmanship, figurative painting, etc.) to turn them into "cold" subjects, creating a kind of perverse and delectable referential dystopia, in the subtext of a work that is accessible at first glance through the prism of figuration and colour.

- Extract from a text by Hugo Pernet

A proposal by Maxime Testu
October 5 to November 23, 2024, Fridays and Saturdays, 2pm to 7pm
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